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Bismillah writes "The ABS has released the census data for the country under a Creative Commons license, but instead of making it easy to get, they've put in Javascript to obfuscate file paths and more. All commented in the source code of course."
At first glance, it's an attempt to get people to pay $250 for a DVD with the data instead.

Prosecutors in Australia are just public servants. Although we have just as stupid laws (often because the US government "lobbies" for "consistency"), the prosecutors on the whole are actually quite sensible. Yes, there are cases where an over-zealous prosecutor has harassed someone but, (1) these are the exception and not the rule, and (2) the DPP institutions tend to have functional governance structures which identify and correct such misbehavior.

"The ABS is constantly looking at ways it can simplify the website and enhance the user experience,"

While at the same time telling their actual developers to make it more difficult;

... generate a random number, which we append to the URL, to make it appear as if a complex
key is required. This is a pathetic attempt to discourage someone from downloading the ZIPs
directly (ie. without having to login), if they deduce the URL pattern.

As an American, trust me: nobody cares about 95+% of the America-related news reported here, either. To the extent that this particular story is interesting at all (ie, not much), the noteworthy aspect is the attempt to obfuscate accessibility to free data by following the letter of the law and using technology to dissuade people from (rightfully) taking advantage.

Since the data is available for free (obfuscated or not) and was released under a CC license, technically this should all be considered legal, right? Not that it should be necessary of course.

The obfuscation is probably because hosting and bandwidth are not cheap in Oz and some inventive public servant (stop snickering, they do exist, there aren't many of them but they do exist) came up with a way to reduce the bandwidth bill. With the current emphasis on public service spending and impending election, this wouldn't surprise me.

Either that or some hopeless public servant coder has no idea what they've done.

There may be inventive public servants, but I highly doubt they are inventive enough to make a stupid obfuscated download system just so that some guy would bittorrrent it, and thereby save the government a small amount of money on bandwidth. I mean really.

There may be inventive public servants, but I highly doubt they are inventive enough to make a stupid obfuscated download system just so that some guy would bittorrrent it, and thereby save the government a small amount of money on bandwidth. I mean really.

You've never worked in the APS have you.
The fewer people you have to serve, the better your balance sheet looks. If someone else can do it, why not.

Usual reason for doing this with official data is to avoid sensation-seekers 'hotlinking' to specific data without noting the disclaimers, statistical cautions, changes of basis etc. which moderate any interpretation.

There may be a usual reason to ensure disclaimers, etc are read, but javascript is definitely not the way to go. You can very easily require a specific http referrer URL by configuring Apache to require it for a file or directory. Or you can simply have a plain old README or LICENSE file included in the tarball. Javascript just hurts usability and makes things over complicated and broken.

Hopeless? No idea? Put yourself in their shoes. Here you've got some CC licensed data. Manager tells you he wants to dissuade people from downloading it, charging 250 pop for the data on DVD instead. You just *know* that this is a waste of time, because the first getting the DVD is gonna be disgruntled and will legally put the stuff on bittorrent anyway. So technically, you're just wasting everyones time: Yours, your managers, and the download

I saw the title text and thought the census data was being provided through bittorrent. A few games including the popular World of Warcraft distribute their updates through the protocol, seeing it adopted in other areas to reduce the bandwidth costs seems like a good idea.

I'm not sure if you're joking here but the Australian government actually DOES copyright legal documents. For example to comply with telephone wiring regulations requires access to a document released by "Standards Australia" which costs about $200 last I checked. I don't doubt that the document was developed using public funds. I'm sure this shit happens a lot more than people realise.

Thanks a lot Slashdot. Now I have a sudden urge to know precisely how many married couples with the husbands between the ages of 30 and 32 inclusive have children in Queensland, and what the genders of and ages of the children are.

This follows on my "best method to get tech support from a computer person." You don't ask "How do you...?" You assert, loudly, within hearing range of the computer person "This is the absolute beset way to do it!" and provide a woefully incorrect method of getting to the result you're trying to achieve. One of these methods will have the computer person falling over himself to help you. Guess which one. Have I mentioned that I'm Evil lately?

Anyway, they're pulling the same thing here. They want someone to gather up their data and present it in a nice package for free. The best way to do that is to drop an ineptly-presented steaming pile of crap on the internets. There'll probably be 15 open source projects to slice and dice it on github by the weekend, and it didn't cost the Australian government a dime! It's brilliant!

Of course! Androids hate that shit. Man, this one time I was talking to a T1000 and told it the absolute best way to kill Sarah Conner was to make it look like an autoerotic asphyxiation accident. Oh it got ALL pissed off! It was like "Nuh uh! Here! Watch this!"...

If you could read, you might have seen that phrase spelled "could've", which is a contraction of the phrase "could have". Instead, you heard it spoken out loud and parsed it incorrectly as "could of". What the !@#$ does "could of" even mean?!?

"The ABS is constantly looking at ways it can simplify the website and enhance the user experience," iTnews was told via email.

Stop hosting it on Lotus Domino servers and you won't have to worry about how many people download the damned data.

U crazy? After millions paid for the Lotus servers and zillions in staff training (or... was it train stuffing? in the context, the results would be the same), you want the IT dept head to... well, lose her/his head?

What is the point of putting a creative commons license on data that is not copyrightable. Anyone can take the data and do anything they want with it and there is nothing anyone can do about it. If it were otherwise, no one would be able to broadcast the temperature without permission from the weather office. How well would that system work?

What is the point of putting a creative commons license on data that is not copyrightable. Anyone can take the data and do anything they want with it and there is nothing anyone can do about it. If it were otherwise, no one would be able to broadcast the temperature without permission from the weather office. How well would that system work?

You can't copyright facts, but there are copyright-style laws covering a collection of facts organised into a database. That said, creative commons probably isn't the right licence for the same reason it wasn't the right licence for open street map (who have now migrated to a different permissive licence designed for databases of facts).

// Also, generate a random number, which we append to the URL, to make it appear as if a complex//key is required. This is a pathetic attempt to discourage someone from downloading the ZIPs//directly (ie. without having to login), if they deduce the URL pattern.

Translation:

Coder: "Here's the census web application."PHB: "Great. But wait..I can just type in these other names and download them really easily! People will hack us and we'll be out possibly a COUPLE THOUSAND DOLLARS! "Coder: "It is Creative Commons data, so of course we added no protection. Changing that now will be a massive rewrite and take months."PHB: "So let's add some random numbers to the end so it looks really complex and people can't guess how to get in."Coder: "But they still will eventually see the links because they do actually have to download it, so this is not really doing anything."PHB: "Psh, no one is smart enough to figure that out. I read about this GUID things and they're really hard to guess. It will work. This is your job today."Coder "..Ok, fine. I'll do it exactly the way you asked."

Coder: (And then I'll put it in the comments so that everyone can see what idiots we are)

Yeah, nice try. But the coder actually thinks he's being really clever and doesn't realize all his Javascript comments are available for the world to read because he's actually an idiot (but he's a coder working for a government institution, so that's pretty much a given). No conspiracy here. They probably don't even realize what it means that it's under a CC license.

But the coder actually thinks he's being really clever and doesn't realize all his Javascript comments are available for the world to read...

More likely he knows exactly what he's doing, meaning he's telling all the world what a blithering moron of a manager told him to do today. There are times when diplomacy is contra-indicated and the potential downside (blithering moron manager finding out about it) is very small. I'd say blithering moron manager painted himself into this corner.

The actual thought process behind the comments would have been more like:

Coder: (And then I'll put it in the comments so that everyone can see what idiots my bosses are)

I have news for you: The geek community laboring in bondage to governmental PHBs lives for the opportunity to secretly sabotage their masters' moronic agendas while looking like the perfect collaborationist stooges to everyone who can't read code. A nerd underground,

Why on earth did they waste time and money obfusticating something that is licensed on the creative commons. All someone has to do is either buy the DVD or reverse engineer the site once and they can put it up on their own website

I gather this is data being published by a government agency. As all agencies are funded by taxpayers, all records -- with exceptions for security and privacy -- should already be open to the public. Creative Commons seems inappropriate here; the correct notice should be "Public Domain", or is Aussie law different in this respect from US law?

I gather this is data being published by a government agency. As all agencies are funded by taxpayers, all records -- with exceptions for security and privacy -- should already be open to the public. Creative Commons seems inappropriate here; the correct notice should be "Public Domain", or is Aussie law different in this respect from US law?

US law is actually the one out of step with the rest of the world - in the vast majority of countries, government records are under some form of copyright, not PD.

The Australian government is excellent at selling to the public products that the public have paid to produce. In the US (at least in theory) products of the US government are in the public domain and not eligible for copyright. I know, there are tons of things the US government produces that are exempt from this.
I know this is a simplistic view, but Australia should not be selling things to people that they have already bought with their tax dollars.

And we all know all forms of central planning always fail at everything. That's why centrally planned, hierarchical organisations like religions, corporations and military forces have never been successful at anything.